All posts by “Moritz”

Shadow Projections

When stumbling upon Kumi Yamashita’s amazing artworks, we felt inspired to try our hand at the underlying technique of projecting shadows from a light source. In this tutorial we’ll be creating shapes and object arrangements that form a shadow image when hit with a single […]

Rope Typography Using Houdini’s Vellum & Octane Render

After seeing polygonpen’s C4D Rope tutorial on Lesterbanks, we though – why not give it a go in Houdini. So in this tutorial we’re gonna go over creating a basic vellum sim which will form the backbone of our rope typo, then creating said rope […]

Guest Tutorial – Jeroen Claus: Origami Bunny

Super happy to have Phospho’s Jeroen Claus back to present one of his production setups, this time covering how to turn any geometry into an origami version of itself, inspired by the amazing work of Robby Kraft. Project Assets Download Project File

Advanced Setups 00 – Intro

It’s time for a new premium course – and Mo has been looking for a topic that’d allow him to bundle together a few of the more involved setups he built. So “Advanced Setups” it is. How original. In this course we’re gonna dive into […]

Houdini: Baking Point Attributes To Textures

EDIT: For more point to texture attribute trickery have a look at the scene files. In our tutorial on dissolving geometry we hinted at baking point distances into a texture rather than using highly subdivided geometry to store attributes from a point cloud. While this […]

Axiom Solver: Dissolving Logo

In our tradition to being late to the party, we’re giving Matt Puchala’s Axiom solver a spin. It’s a lightweight and fast pyro solver for SideFX Houdini, enabling interactive workflows with smoke or fire simulations. In this video we’re gonna use it together with Houdini’s […]

Production Setup: Audioreactive Particles Using Vellum & POPs

You wanted to know how to set up something similar to Daniel Sierra’s “Oscillate” in Houdini. So in this tutorial we’ll walk you through the steps necessary to not only create an audioreactive Vellum simulation but also add secondary particles into that simulation and create […]

Mograph Liquids: Controlling FLIP Fluids Via Curve Forces

Been going through a few of Jeff Wagner’s feature presentations from a the last few Houdini releases and stumbled upon a gem which I thought I’d base a setup on: Controlling FLIP fluids using a curve. Throw in a tiny bit of VDB/VEX magic and […]

Guest Tutorial: Simon Fiedler – Controlling Swirly Particles

It finally happened – our dear friend Simon Fiedler agreed to record a guest tutorial for us. He decided to share one of his production tricks for controlling particles: Building a swirly vector field to advect particles. Although it looks organic and natural, it’s highly […]

Morphing Point Portraits

You just want to distract yourself on twitter and you stumble upon this tweet by Daniel Piker. Naturally we had to give it a go in Houdini. And it turns out it can be done with surprisingly few nodes and without any sort of scripting… […]

Keycap Sculptures (Disco Ball Tiling)

When we received an E-Mail by Eduard, asking if we had any idea about disco ball packing, we were intrigued. Eduard pointed out that his (apparently very patient) wife manually tiled this sculpture and was wondering if there’s any way to automate it. He also […]

Bubbles Yet Again: Implementing Glassner’s Bubble Triplets in VEX

Bubbles. Again. How thrilling. Wait – before you leave hear me out: Building this setup was one major step for me towards becoming brave enough to tackle implementing my first computer graphics paper. Andrew Glassner wrote a fantastic article about how soap bubble triplets form […]

Holiday Giveaway: Mantra Thinfilm Shader

Happy Holidays! Turns out rendering spherical objects has become our very own tradition by now, so as an addon to Monday’s tut and the question “But can u do it in Mantra?” – Here’s a small present hastily thrown together by yours truly: A VEX […]

Bubbles Again: Simulating Soap Swirls Using FLIP

By now it might have become apparent that Mo might be a bit fixated with soap bubbles and soap films. We covered Minimal Surfaces, soap film shading in Octane and in Redshift. Yet we deliberately omitted one crucial step in rendering nice soap bubbles: Creating […]

Sloppy Unreal 03: Correcting Mistakes & Bevelling Legos

EDIT: Damn it, I think specular in UE and me are cursed. When I was testing this setup I had post processing exposure cranked up, which messed up my results. Turns out that specular expects a value between 0 and 1 which internally is remapped […]

Sloppy Unreal 01: Camera Controls Using Blueprints

Mo has been silent for a while. That’s due to him spending his days finishing projects and yelling at Unreal Engine. The goal is getting to a point where we’re comfortable bringing together Houdini workflows and UE. That road is long. To discover Unreal, the […]

Meet Chris Kopic

Subscribers of our Patreon already noticed – we have a new face on board. Meet Chris Kopic, technical artist, educator and designer. Chris agreed to teaching an area of Houdini we neglected until now: PDG. His premium course already launched and we’re very much looking […]

New In Houdini 18.5 – KineFX

Full Playlist Here Revisiting an old technique Manu covered a while ago. But this time using H18.5’s new KineFX tools to make it a tiny bit less painful. Nevertheless Mo of course dives into VEX and a bit of linear algebra. Links Manu’s previous tut […]

New In Houdini 18.5

Full Playlist Here Houdini 18.5 is out! And here are the features that got us excited! Of course there’s much more. (SOP based rigging anyone?!) We had great joy in seeing that Karma has come a long way and that real time pyro sims in […]

Workshop: Unreal Engine Quickstart

Full playlist here. Super hyped to have Matthias Winckelmann on board! You might know him from “Rachael is not real” where he built an AI design influencer bot that posts daily renderings to instagram. Matthias has been using Unreal Engine in his personal design process […]

Exporting Alembics For Blender: A Few Hacks

EDIT: Thanks so much for the many comments & hints! Josh Rizzo on Twitter pointed out I’m missing a few import options when loading in the alembic. Here’s how to import animated attributes without a deforming/animated mesh:– Import Alembic– Check “Set Frame Range” and “Is Sequence” […]

Guest Tutorial: Path Solver

We’re thrilled to have Houdini artist supreme Vladyslav Lavrenov for a guest tutorial. And quite a hefty one! Vlad takes us through his reasoning and steps to build a path solver in Houdini to have seemingly random momevements on a grid form a coherent behaviour. […]

Silly Pillow Pt. 2: Adding Detail & Tweaking Stitches

In part two of our silly pillow series, Mo adds detailed wrinkles by tweaking our Vellum sim’s constraint parameters. This makes our pillow look more like something out of a Franquin comic. Also you’ll be exposed to two lines of VEX script. You’ve been warned. […]

Silly Pillow Pt. 1: Setting Up Stitches In Vellum

Mo needed something relaxing after a longer stretch of math, algorithms and OpenCL. So we decided to build something quick, rewarding and fun: A weird inflatable structure in Vellum. Download Project File